I'm giving away four signed copies of What's Left of Kisses, a collection of historical novellas to four randomly selected commenters. It's going to be tricky to get these to anybody (even in the States) before Christmas, so don't count on that!
To be eligible for this drawing, share a memory of your grandparents (or a great-aunt or a great-uncle) -- and if it's a holiday memory, so much the better!
My grandfather used to sneak us tastes of the turkey. My grandmother would get so mad.
ReplyDeletedebby236 at gmail dot com
Oh, I love that coloring page, Johanna. Such a wonderful feel to it. I have photos of my uncle in a coat and hat just like that.:)
ReplyDeleteI guess I'll tell you about my Christmas ornaments from WWII. They are plastic and metal, made in the shape of a B17 bomber. My father sent them home to my mother while he was in the Army. He was supposed to be flying a B17, but discovered he was colorblind, and could not be a pilot. There were about 6 ornaments in different colors. They still hang on my tree today.
Ack. blogger must have eaten my first comment. (If two suddenly appear, I apologize)
ReplyDeleteI was saying that I loved Johanna's drawing. It has a wonderful feel to it. I still have photos of my uncle dressed in that exact hat and coat. :)
As for my memory, I will tell you about my WWII Christmas ornaments. They are plastic and metal and made in the shape of a B17 bomber. My father sent them home to my mom when he was in the Army. He was supposed to be flying one of those planes, but discovered he was colorblind, so he was grounded. He had piloted planes all his life, before and after the war, but the Army apparently was more exacting than crop dusting. :) There were about 6 ornaments, in different colors and a few still hang on my tree today.
When I was a little tyke, we spent Christmas at my grandma's house. My mom's siblings and their kids were there so sleeping space was hard to come by. I always ended up on a cot at the end of my grandma and grandpa's bed. Of course, I didn't sleep on Christmas Eve and started asking to get up almost before my parents had been to sleep. When I tried to get up, grandma would yell at me that it wasn't time, and I needed to get back into bed. So I'd wait until she started snoring, then I'd roll off the cot, and belly crawl down the hall to my parent's room and ask if it was time to get up. When a negative answer came, as it did several times, I'd have to sneak back down the hall and back into my bed. It was all part of the Christmas experience.
ReplyDeleteWhat a gorgeous drawing. I love Johanna's work. I was lucky enough to have three wonderful grandmothers. My mom's stepmother made my Barbie clothes by hand. Every Christmas I couldn't wait to open the box from her and see what new items had been added to Barbie's wardrobe.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite memory of my grandmother is a strudel with plum jam and walnuts she used to make for us grandkids. To this day I can see her clearly as a day when I sense a smel of a fresh baked strudel in the air. She would make it for any and every occassion. Christmas as well. Powdered sugar would be all over my face. And chlotes. And the look on her face was pure joy and pride. I miss her very much.
ReplyDeletegoge
We spent alternate christmases with either my mum's parents in the north or everyone at our house. One year when I was about 3 or 4 I was playing with my grandpy when there was something about Santa on the tv news. The cat took one look at the screen and ran straight over to the fireplace and climbed up into the chimney. Grandpy and I spent the next ages trying to coax the kitten out and then trying to get him clean, all without tipping off my mother! I suspect she knew because I was filthy, but she never said anything about it :-)
ReplyDeleteMy family loves reading, and it's obvious that goes back generations. Granddad would sit and read "Br'er Rabbit" to us, complete with voices. I can hear him, clear as day, saying aggrievedly, "Pleeeeeease don't throw me in that briar patch!" And every Christmas, Grandma would take her turn and read "That Donkey." She had the sweetest southern accent.
ReplyDeleteMy Grandmother, we kids called her Omi, had taken me every Christmas Eve, the day the children gets their presents, to the graveyard. We were there early 'to visit Grandpa'. On the way to his grave she told me about his smile and that he was such a nice human. When we came across a forgotten grave, we stood their for a moment to lay a fir cone on the grave and to wish a beautiful Christmas. At my Grandpa's grave she lit a candle and told him to wait a little bit longer and then we went home again. I loved my Omi with all my heart.
ReplyDeleteThe first thing that comes to mind when I think of my Grandparents is Christmas Day at their big old house. Grandpa built it in the early 1900s after the Grest Fire of Metz destroyed their family home. Next to the Christmas tree in the living room was a green chair that swiveled all the way around. We weren't supposed to spin like that, but we did anyway. But the best thing was the bowl of old-fashioned hard candy Grandma always kept filled during the holidays.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if eating rice porridge at Christmas is only Scandinavian tradition? In any case, my grandma made THE BEST rice porridge ever. And luckily she didn't limit making it only to Christmas! Every Saturday at my grandparents' was a rice porridge day, because also my grandpa LOVED it. In fact I grew up hearing rice porridge being called Tuta's porridge ("Tuta" means "grandpa" in certain Finnish regions). On Saturdays grandma cooked Tuta's porridge on the stove, but on Sundays the leftovers of that porridge were heated in the oven — and that tasted even better than it did on the previous day!
ReplyDeleteKaran's wonderful Christmas tree ornament memory reminded me of the beautiful Christmas tree ornaments I got to admire and gently stroke at my grandparents when I was very small. The tiny, silky ornaments were the kind I had never seen before. They weren't regular, hard, plastic ornaments, but ball-shaped ornaments coated with the softest, thinnest silk strands ever. How smooth and silky they felt underneath my fingertips! They glowed beautifully, they were all different color and I absolutely adored them. My uncle had brought them from Canada to where he had moved in 1950s. I haven't thought of them for ages, so I do feel like thanking Karan for provoking this fond memory. :-)
Risengrot with butter and cinnamon and sugar!
DeleteYes!!! Exactly! And with a hidden almond in it at Christmas — and who ever finds it in his/her plate is blessed with good luck. :-)
DeleteMy grandparents are all dead, but I keep really sweet memories about them. Specially of my mum's mum, she was a really clever woman who loved reading and liked to have her own space and solitude. We spend a lot of time reading together. I think we were alike in many things, but there was one thing we differed a lot: she was a wonderful cook. She made these delicious croquettes... How I miss them. My anecdote is related to these croquettes. Once I was with her while she was frying them, and she asked me to keep an eye on them because she had to get out... Preparing the croquettes is quite difficult, and you have to be careful when frying them because they burn easily. Anyway, I got so engrossed in my book that I forgot to take care of the food... And they burnt completely!
ReplyDeleteWhen she got back she was angry, but she did not really get mad at me. She understood reading was distracting... I miss her. A lot.
I must say that Miss Butterwith and I always have a perfectly lovely Christmas, so I will share the Adventure of my ghost writer:
ReplyDeleteBefore heading off to her grandmother's house she would be sure to fill up on all the wonderful leftovers from her mother's traditional Norwegian Christmas Eve dinner. This was in preparation of Christmas dinner of raw turkey, potato paste, and vegetable mash.....the dinner rolls were mostly ok.
The fun was always had by playing hide and seek in the amazing basement.
And then it was heading home to have more wonderful leftovers from Christmas Eve dinner.
Christmas was always special because all of our relatives came over to eat and drink for the day. My great uncle Milton was especially welcome. When my mom was little she called him Uncle Button which my brother and sisters and I found terribly funny. He always brought great cheer and had a laugh that boomed through the house. It was deep and hearty and never failed to make me laugh right along with him even if I was too young to understand what was so funny.
ReplyDeleteI do miss Uncle Button!
There are two things that stand out from my maternal grandparents. One being my sisters liked to eat the dog's biscuits. And the other is feeding Cindy, the grandparent's Irish Setter chewed chewing gum. I do have one Christmas memory of my maternal Grandparents coming to our house for dinner and we all sat around the ping pong table. It was the only table that would fit all of us.
ReplyDeleteMy Nana is still alive and kicking at 91 so I am just so thankful for every Christmas she is here. She still bakes the cookies and the pies for our party.
ReplyDeleteI left a comment earlier, and it seems to have disappeared! Anyway - I love this picture. Well done! I was lucky enough to have three wonderful grandmothers. My mom's stepmother made all of my Barbie doll's clothes. Every Christmas I couldn't wait to open the box from her to see what my Barbie would be wearing in the coming year.
ReplyDeleteYeah, may moment's gone, too. Neverminds, it was fun to write!
DeleteWe were visiting the grandparents (Dad's parents) over holidays when I was little and I remember that it was totally fascinating to me that my grandparents' tree would have edible things as ornaments, like fondant stars and chocolate pine cones. No such things in our tree at home. Even more fascinating how they would not eat them until after Christmas. All the the yummy things right before your nose (literally when you're only a 3 foot tall) and noone was eating them?
ReplyDeleteShows you that my career as a chocolate lover started early... ;-)
I love the clever montage of photo and drawing, Johanna! Which of the guys is it in the pic?
DeleteThank you, Calathea. That's Nathan (in chapter 5). :-)
DeletePrune plums freshly stewed, homemade tomato soup steaming in the pot, fresh dill wafting in the air & a bright red beach ball resting on my head. All my active memories have to do with taste, aroma or color. This is probably due to the fact my grandparents died before I was five. I'm lucky to have memories.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I never knew my real grandparents, I did have some grandparents, American-style.
ReplyDeleteWhen my mother arrived in America, she was a young, pretty, naïve, lonely woman. And she was pregnant. In short, she was an irresistible sight for an older woman in search of someone to mother. She quickly accumulated a few sets of foster parents.
One set of foster grandparents was Burton and Maud Hayes, an elderly couple who were introduced to my mother by a Lebanese nurse at the hospital. Mr. Hayes was a high school teacher and Mrs. Hayes stayed home. To my mother, who thinks of people as "social friends" or "true friends," the Hayes’ were true friends. The one little problem was that they were also devout Christians who saw in Mother an opportunity to bring a heathen into the fold. After a lot of talking, they arranged for her to come with them to church. Since Mother only had one good dress, the universal female problem of what to wear was automatically solved.
So, when the Hayes' arrived, one fine Sunday morning to pick her up, the sight that greeted them was my mother in her one and only dress, a skin-tight, black lace Mandarin gown, slit up to mid-thigh on either side.
"Praise the lord!" shouted Grandpa Hayes, when he saw her.
Grandma Hayes was unperturbed. After all, a soul was at stake; no time to get upset about fashion trends. She beckoned my mother into the car and off they went.
Mother eventually discerned that black lace, thigh-baring dresses were not the best church garments. She looked around at what people were wearing and then bought some gray corduroy fabric from which she made a jumper that became her "church dress. Eventually, she solved the fashion problem altogether by ceasing to go to church.
My grandparents were the designated Mr and Mrs Claus for our local community Christmas party which meant that they had to shop for hundreds of underprivileged children each year. Since they were unwise in the ways of toys they would haul my sister, cousin and myself to stores during the Christmas season for toy approval. We would all get a cart and my granny would shout out "we need twenty six baby dolls" or "find me fourteen of those robot thingies". Even though she'd get really stressed out it was always a really good time and I'm pretty sure the other shoppers were really annoyed by us so that was a bonus.
ReplyDeleteSeveral decades ago, on a warm and bright December day, my maiden grand-aunt and I ended our relationship in the dining room of the festively decorated Occidental Hotel. We had been drinking martinis, as was our custom when we re-connected, either in my city, D.C., or in her home and my childhood home city, Manhattan. The martinis were excellent and warming and really didn’t play a role since our disagreement was both inevitable and intractable. My grand-aunt was named Blanche and she was an influential figure in my extended family. She had curly jet-black hair, belted out unconventional opinions about everything, and was famous for having a very high level position in New York City government and for subsequently getting fired by the mayor in a kind of political coup. My cousins and I adored her because she was invested in us, taking us ice skating in Central Park, and finding us jobs over the summer anywhere we wanted to work. And she loved us in her own way, which was not very demonstrative, but you could still sense it.
ReplyDeleteOn the day in question, we met and embraced, and ordered our martinis in a vast dining room bathed all in white for the white Christmas (optimistic in D.C.),white bows, white ornaments, white halogen lights. My aunt asked after my little family (my husband and my young daughter at that time) and then proceeded to berate me for not working. I don’t recall precisely what she said, but the gist of it was that I was wasting my life and would be sorry. Since I was a stay at home mom, I took it very hard. I don’t recall giving more than a token rebuttal, but when we left, a little tipsy, and sated on a three course meal, I felt as though I was saying goodbye to her for good, which it turned out, I was. I never saw her again, because she died shortly after that event.
I went on to have a career I’m proud of. Even though it didn’t happen exactly the way Aunt Blanche would have planned for me, I came to recognize the importance of working and of giving of yourself to others and not just to those in your nuclear family. I also came to realize that steering young adults was a delicate process. You can’t dictate. You can throw out suggestions and see if they have traction. You can gracefully accept it when they don’t.
I raise my glass to you, Aunt Blanche. You were wrong and you were right.
Most of my grandparents died when I was quite young, so I don't have strong memories. I do remember the rice pudding with an almond tradition on my maternal side. The rice pudding is prepared then an almond put into it. Whoever gets the almond is supposed to have good luck in the new year. Usually it was said that they were either going to be married or have a child. I loved the rice pudding, but never did get that almond.
ReplyDeleteThe last time I saw my grandma was over the Christmas holiday in 1986, when she met my soon-to-be husband. Sadly she was killed shortly before Christmas the following year. My family drew names for gift exchange among the adults. Grandma had drawn my name and had purchased my gift, a lovely Black Hills Gold necklace, before she died. Although it's no longer my stle I wear it every Christmas day in her memory.
ReplyDeleteMy grandparents were immigrants — from Hungary, Italy, and Lithuania. My paternal grandmother was Lithuanian. Grandma Petrina become an Italian coal miner's wife in Oklahoma, was left with her two small sons, and moved to New Mexico. She remarried a New Mexico man, our Grandpa Nash (Ignacio), also a miner. When the local mines closed in the 1940s, they moved to Albuquerque. She loved to tell us about the famous Christmas display in their small mining town between here and Santa Fe. Large painted plywood cut-outs were decorated with lights and placed along the top of a hillside, and people from Albuquerque and Santa Fe would drive out to see it. My grandfather died when I was seven, so my sharper memories are of the years after that. Our father would drive us over to her little house to set up luminarias (candles and sand in brown paper bags) along her front wall and up the sidewalk. Then we'd ring the doorbell and she would always act very surprised that we were there, even though I sometimes saw her peaking through her curtains. Now on Christmas Eve my sister and I set up luminarias at the cemetery for Grandma and Grandpa Nash, for my dad, and four other relatives.
ReplyDeleteMy grandmother, aunt and mother made pizelles every Christmas. I have vivid memories of them standing in front of my grandmother's stove wielding long-handled, cast iron presses. Each cookie involved placing a ball of dough in the press, flattening the dough between the sides of the press, and heating the iron over a burner until a beautiful, thin, crisp waffle was produced. My two cousins, two sisters and I helped out by rolling the balls of dough. It was always an evening of fun, family, and yummy treats.
ReplyDeleteMy Nana & Papa (Mom's parents) lived in a small home on a lake in the middle of Northern Michigan's forest. We always spent a week there for Christmas. At that time it was like another world. The TV stayed off, we were occupied and blessed by a never ending stream of friends, family, and food. Nana made The Best apple pies and pecan tarts. We gathered around the pool table which was next to the fireplace and played for fun. (Well, the adults may have wagered occassionally). Papa would sit in his chair and when he rang a bell, one of us kids would bring him a whisky. OMG, were we being corrupted? Fond memories. :-D
ReplyDeleteWater filled glass candles with bubbles rising as it heated over the Christmas lights, real tinsel, beautiful glass ornaments, ribbon candy, Midnight Mass with a traditional feast to break fast at my grandparents house, Turkey, veggies, French Canadian tortier, at least 8 sweet pies, piles of cookies, 17 first cousins, and aunts, uncles, and of course, my doting grandparents. Today, I'm grateful for the stability of my childhood in that small city. I could walk to both sets of grandparent's house, and nearly all my aunts, uncles, and cousins.
ReplyDeleteNan and Pop would put on a feast of cold meats and salads and after gorging ourselves we would finally hand out the presents from under the Christmas tree (I'm sure this was done purposely at this time so that we wouldn't head straight outside). Once all presents had been ooh-ed and aah-ed over we would be allowed to go swimming in the pool. My grandparents had the BEST pool for making whirlpools!! Christmas in Australia can be extremely hot so the rest of the day was out by the pool.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I just have to say that coloring book page is beautiful. Thank you for sharing it, Johanna.
ReplyDeleteAs for a holiday memory about my grandparents, I'll share one that happened as an adult but actually happened when I was a kid! One year for Christmas, my older brothers and I got a gift from my grandparents on my dad's side. When we unwrapped the package it was a radio flyer wagon. Now who wouldn't want to open that right away and take that beauty for a spin? Well, us, it turns out (even though I'm too young to remember that decision), because we already had one. So, the unopened wagon sat and sat...and sat. MANY years go by when my eldest brother has a child, and she's old enough to finally take a fun ride in a wagon. It's not Christmastime anymore, but it turned into Christmas again that day. But not for my niece, for the three of us, as adults. My grandparents hadn't sent us a wagon, they'd sent us presents inside the wagon box. I'm sure by the time I reached that age I would have long forgotten (especially because of my age) what I'd received that year, but now I have the cutest crocheted Christmas dress and long red socks for a baby and a kewpie doll still in its box. I no longer have my grandparents, and I know I wouldn't have forgotten how much we meant to them, but getting those gifts was such a special experience for me, and I treasure them.
(Leaving my email in case it's needed - caroaz [at] ymail [dot] com)